2020 shaping up — as 2016!

Bernie Sanders has had a heart attack. If this is anything more than the sort of blip on a heart scan that doctors notice two months later, there is little question that his presidential campaign is done. In fact, under these circumstances, I think it would say a lot about his immoderate lust for power if he even considered staying in the race at age 78, given the realities of the recuperative process after a heart attack requiring surgery to insert stents.

Joe Biden is almost as old as Sanders, he has become a laughing stock even among Democrats, he lacks the overt radicalism that the party’s insurgent vanguard is demanding these days, and he is bound to remain continually knotted up in the reporting about Trump’s Ukrainian phone calls. He appears to be done.

Realistically, this appears to leave Elizabeth Warren as the last little Indian. She will almost certainly win the Democratic nomination, barring a major health crisis or unforeseen scandal.

This means — and I hate to say it, even though I have long expected that I would eventually have to say it — that the 2020 U.S. election is shaping up to be the 2016 election: A lifelong, lying, cynical progressive authoritarian whose sincerest and most consistent policy positions for twenty years have been the advocacy of socialized healthcare and gun control even more open and extreme than Barack Obama’s, versus a lying, cynical progressive whose greatest presidential aspiration is an ego-gratifying fantasy of being “the first woman president.”

Two social media image producers, two phonies prepared to say anything, affect any attitude, and fabricate absolutely any story, no matter how absurd and hypocritical, to gain personal material advantage or appeal to a particular crowd of the moment. Warren vs. Trump is just Clinton vs. Trump without the physical comedy of Hillary’s hilarious pratfalls on camera, falling lifelessly into limousines, up staircases, and into various people’s arms, and then of course (through a spokesman) reassuring the world she was just fine.

Warren vs. Trump, Trump vs. Warren. Tyrannical and Tyrannicaler. I suppose there is no better election available, as long as America remains spellbound by the establishment’s myth of the “two-party system.”